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Comment by barryvan | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a mixture of the "collections" feature from Firefox Mobile (Beta/Preview) and Firefox's container tabs, but without the security / isolation benefits.

From what I can tell, the main benefit seems to be in relation to identifying similar-looking tabs. It's unfortunate that they didn't bake in the same security and isolation benefits of Firefox's container tabs, or the "put aside and come back to it later" functionality that (old) Edge and Firefox Mobile's "collections" bring.

I'm also not sure how adding _more_ to the tabstrip will improve utility in Chrome, where tabs so quickly become impossible to manage because the strip doesn't scroll.

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A bit tinfoil hat, but could it be an attempt to head off Firefox Containers which would be a threat to Google Cookie collection? That's certainly my main use case for containers, using Google Music without telling the rest of the web about my Google account.

https://github.com/atomontage/chrome-private

This looks very useful, but it combines valuable profile management work with disabling various web features per the author's opinions. Sadly, disabling those features by default makes it significantly easier to fingerprint users using this script (which is precisely the opposite of its intentions).

So I forked it and set those features to be disable-if-requested rather than disable-by-default, so that people who just want to manage separate profiles have an option that doesn't make them easier to fingerprint:

https://github.com/floatingatoll/chrome-private/

Forking to switch a bunch of command line arguments around seems excessive to me. You can simply write a wrapper script that passes the arguments in the way you want them to be passed.

Enabling those options does nothing to improve fingerprinting resistance, it's a completely bogus argument.

Disabling them however, in combination with the recommended extensions that are in the README plus custom user agent handling, does bring tangible benefits.

Finally, fingerprinting resistance isn't mentioned once in the README. It's simply too hard a problem for me to claim that this simple script intends to solve it. You can however use the script as a foundation that you can build custom strategies on top of. More than adequate for that purpose.

Forking permits me to efficiently git rebase against upstream when there are changes, using rerere to remember easy conflict resolutions. A wrapper would not work as two of the options cannot be removed from the command line (and the author refused a PR that would have permitted such a wrapper).

I am the author. Flash support in Chrome is going away soon (but even if it didn't) I am not going to be publishing any code with support for that crap baked in. However, it is understandable if you disagree.

Re: referrer option, as I explained, it's a nop. So no point in having extra code for that there either (I really should remove it).

I had to use Flash two weeks ago to get a food handler’s permit online due to pandemic and terrible horrible choice from a list of 20 options, so I am unusually positioned to disagree from personal basis. I do agree that it should die and I can’t wait for it to do so either!

There is also browser fingerprinting, so they may still know it's you even if you are in a private tab.

And IP (range) fingerprinting.

But the point is don't have to give the easy stuff like cookies away for free to mice like Google. They are still going to beg for milk either way, because they are greedy, but you don't have to be hospitable and keep feeding them cookies. (I mean the number of dumb ReCaptcha's I've had to do has gone way up since sequestering Google apps to their own container. Gross.)

It looks like what Opera was doing over a decade ago. IE8 also introduced coloured tabs based on tabs opened by others.

Firefox tried something similar to collections for those "tab collectors" with their Panorama (which is not available anymore these days), which was basically a visual 2d layout of tabs within groups. That's what got me the popup "are you sure you want to close 200 tabs" whenever I accidentally hit the close button.

All earlier attempts by non-Opera browsers seem to have failed so I wonder how long it'll take before Google takes this feature away. They're not a company that keeps new products or ideas around for long if they don't take off. I wouldn't get too used to having it.

Panorama lives on here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-...

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